Why Do Politicians Still Talk About Nevada as a Cowboy State?

I wonder what comes to mind when you think of Nevada, the next state to hold caucuses in the presidential nominating process. Open range and cowboys, jackrabbits and sagebrush? Or do you conjure an older version of the West—the glitz of Vegas, maybe? (What exactly is “glitz,” anyway? A ragged-edged version of glamor? A few flecks of gold or pyrite in a pan-full of placer?) Maybe Nevada isn’t anything at all to you, just another Wyoming or Idaho, another piece of a blurred landscape, generic mountains and deserts.

The truth, of course, is that Nevada is no one of these icons—or it is all of them, along with many more. But even if these outdated versions of the state are no longer representative, they carry a symbolic weight that still plays—especially in politics. My own family has been involved in Nevada politics for the past 50 years, and the mythos of the American West has helped to promote their political identities over the generations. Cowboy boots and denim shirts sit side-by-side with navy suits and red ties in any Nevada politician’s campaign wardrobe. National politicians passing through the state, as many have in recent weeks, have picked up on these cues too. They’re images that invoke a sense of strength, freedom and self-reliance.

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It’s easy to write off this sort of historical appropriation as just another form of campaign pandering, hardly worthy of an eye roll. But the trouble—the reason I and many others raised in Nevada find this imagery so tiresome—is that its promotes a sense of the state that is both outdated and exclusive: one in which political power favors the romanticized heroes of the Old West, Anglo males, while ignoring the true racial and cultural demographics of Nevada today.

The indoctrination into Old West iconography begins at a young age in Nevada. At Archie Clayton Middle School in Reno in the early 1990s, I was required to spend an entire semester in a class about Nevada’s history. It began with the “earliest settlers” in the territory: first, the fur trappers from the east, and then the cattlemen and the mining and railroad barons that industrialized the state. We were told that the state of Nevada as we knew it didn’t even exist until 1864, when we won the Civil War for Abraham Lincoln with gold and silver from the Comstock Lode and were granted statehood in return. (The refrain from one of the many “Nevada” songs we learned went, “My name is Miss Nevada / I was born in ’64 / I have the cash to pay my way / with a million tons of ore.”)

As we got older, we learned of Nevada’s “extra” freedoms, too, though these lessons came outside the classroom: your father allowing you to pull the handle on a nickel slot machine in an old Basque restaurant; searching the waters of the Truckee River below the Virginia Street Bridge for wedding rings tossed away by out-of-towners after a quick divorce; a classmate’s older sister who was rumored to work at the BunnyRanch just east of Reno.

Politicians—both local and national—have long campaigned in terms of these anachronistic symbols of the Old West. In the 1970s and 80s, one of Nevada’s more prominent Republican politicians was Paul Laxalt, a governor and senator who also happens to be a great-uncle on my mother’s side. Paul drew heavily on his roots as the son of a Basque immigrant sheepherder to create his political identity,oftenhosting well-known politicians of the era (including Ronald Reagan) at a family camp in the Sierra that was originally purchased for grazing land. Inevitably, these trips yielded pictures of middle-aged men in cowboy hats and Levis, more evidence of “Nevadaness” for the next election. Even today, three decades later, Nevada newspapers are still rife with photographs like these, of Democrats and Republicans alike showing off denim shirts and firing shotguns.

These days, one of the newest faces on the political scene in Nevada is Laxalt’s grandson (and my second cousin), Adam Laxalt, who was elected the state attorney general in 2014. Although the younger Laxalt grew up in Washington, D.C., and didn’t move to Nevada until 2011, he has repeatedly drawn on the mythology of the Old West in his political efforts. The 2014 campaign saw Adam shaking hands in rural towns, donning cowboy boots and brushpoppers. Last summer, in the small town of Gardnerville, he hosted a “Basque Fry,” a western-themed barbeque that included presidential candidates like Ted Cruz and Carly Fiorina dressed up in plaid cowboy shirts, jeans and boots, making stump speeches on a stage decorated like the set of Hee Haw, a weathered barn placed conspicuously in the background. Cruz, walking around a stage—surrounded, inexplicably, by hay bales—pledged to give federally owned land in Nevada “back to the state … back to the people, where it belongs,” earning hoots and applause, as cowboy hats bobbed with approval.